Web Scale: Tools vs Architecture

In the advent of the term "WebScale" SQL and NoSQL fanboys have been going back and forth between each other in the fight for consumer trust. Indirectly, developer usage. Flame war after flame war on countless forums has finally forced me to spark the question:

Are there truly any webscale tools, or are there only webscale architectures?

I believe most of the people here have seen the video "MongoDB is webscale": http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/mongo-db-is-web-scale

The SQL: MySQL
The NoSQL: MongoDB

While I'm not siding with either, I find both are flawed. The joins & writes to disk that mysql uses cause massive issues once a site begins to excel into web notoriety. At the same point... MongoDB doesn't actually write anything, everything is stored in memory, and if something happens to your server or you have an issue writing to disk.. your fucked. In both cases neither MySQL or MongoDB server as being reliable or dependable.

Even more hate than SQL vs NoSQL... PHP versus say.. Ruby or Python has received an even bigger onslaught. I've seen people type out "PHP isn't webscale" without any explanation at all, or check out __________ more in than last day, than I've seen explanations of why PHP isn't webscale in the last 2 years when the term webscale first started being used. Even more depressing is seeing the very same developers go on and on about the epic failure that PHP is, then turn right back around and point out that they're absolute wizards with popular scripts like Joomla, Wordpress, PHP ProBid, Drupal, and osCommerce. Or look on Alexia and see that a lot of the biggest names in the web industry are still using PHP and very proud of it. Or looking at RoR driven sites like the ones found here: http://www.softwaredeveloper.com/features/best-ruby-on-rails-061307/

And come to the startling realization that most of them, at best, serve a few small flat files. The biggest name most recognized here is twitter. And at the point in time "name", "date", "string of 150 characters or less"... becomes a massive accomplishment. WTF. I mean.. Just WTF. Facebook with all it's user interaction runs PHP without a hint of lag... twitter... RoR... and does next to nothing by comparison. But then again Facebook is built it's PHP to read from MySQL to read from over 4,000 shards: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2011/07/will-facebook-need-to-start-network-from-scratch.html

- Personal note: I have no doubt in my mind that if Facebook was using RoR & MongoDB they'd be all over sites like highscalabity.com, as is, they get 3 posts this year. 1 didn't even talk about architecture or scale but only Cassandra, which managaes the MySQL shards.

So far, behind every flame, and post directing a developer to another language... the only thing I've seen are webscale tools being advertised. No actual webscale architectures. Regardless of whether said archetitures exist or not.

The question:

Are there webscale tools, or only webscale architetures?

If Webscale Tools, why do pages exist like:

http://www.mysql.com/customers/

If Webscale Architectures, why do architectures which do not use popular languages, not count?

>>1

Dude... Facebook is a failure. They used PHP & MySQL, and sure they have 4000 shards to make it work. But that's 4000 fucking shards... no one in their right mind would do something like that without the optimization of distributed map reduce. As is Facebook will ore than likely collapse under it's own weight.

That said it's a massive failure in design, and architectural planning. Ergo... why there are webscale tools. The hardware is next to meaningless when your tools are fast enough. You don't need 4000 shards to manage a database that's 40x faster than a database built in the fucking 80's.